Chatter

Fame-Out
What happens to your 27-year-old life when you cut one of the top 10 LPs in all history and gross an ionospheric $50 million in one year? Well, for one thing you cart along a couple of bodyguards to every party. "It's not much fun, but you have to be realistic," is the justification. Similarly, 24-hour armed guards patrol your 55-acre New York estate, approachable only through an electronically operated front gate. "Friends ask me how I stand it," muses Peter Frampton. "I just tell them that I have been getting ready for this for a long time, and if it didn't happen, I would be very unhappy."

Unemployment Line
She touts the quicker picker-upper on the tube, but Nancy Walker is no slouch when it comes to a putter-downer. "There's a cult out here that seems to thrive on gossip," says the 53-year-old actress. "I've had people try to tell me things about my best friends who didn't even know them." So what about the rumors that Roz (Pinky Tuscadero) Kelly was axed from Blansky's Beauties because of friction with the star? "I only did one show with her. How would I know how well we got along?" What bugs her are the gratuitous backbiters—"people who talk about others because they simply have nothing else to do." Who're they? "Unemployed actors."

Turning Pro
"I said something stupidly crass to him," winces Richard (Jaws) Dreyfuss of his first meeting with Tony Randall on the set of a now-forgotten flick some years back. "I said, 'Why are you doing a piece of crap like this?' He turned and said, 'Because I haven't done a picture in five years—that's why I'm doing this piece of crap.' " Now Dreyfuss is 29 and finds (in the words of A.E. Housman), " 'Tis true, 'tis true." He refers to his role in the ABC quickie Victory at Entebbe as a "complete and utter fraud." Confides Dreyfuss, who maybe learned a thing or three from Duddy Kravitz: "I did it for the money [$50,000 a day for five days]. I was a whore, and I don't want to make out like it was any other way. My only saving grace is that no one else would want to turn down that kind of money either."

Show Time
Though he's added a few pounds to an already ample paunch in his new job, Budget Director Bert Lance is wraithlike in one aspect—he seems to spend more time in the White House and his Georgia home than the office. When the elusive Lance made one of his rare drop-ins at the weekly senior-staff meeting, however, the surprised troops perked up—until they spied the reason. All in the Family's toothsome Sally Struthers was on hand as 1977 frontwoman for the U.S. Savings Bond drive. Groused one OMB minion: "You can bet Lance wouldn't have come if Carroll O'Connor was this year's pin-up."

Private Wife
Those over-30 bacchantes who throw their room keys and wedding rings at his feet may only want to unbutton their fantasies, but Welsh singer Tom Jones takes no chances with his million-buck mystique. On a breather from his current tour to throw a 20th birthday bash in Houston for his son Mark, Jones gave the press an order. No pictures were to be taken of the lady who flew in from London for the occasion, thereby denying his fans a view of Linda Jones, to whom the 36-year-old Welsh stallion has been wed since he was 16.

Furthermore

•In sending off a planeload of Minnesota businessmen to Havana, their senior senator musingly endorsed the lifting of the Cuban trade embargo. The (Hubert) Humphrey Doctrine: "I am willing to sell them anything they can't shoot back."

•Vanity is the spice of life, as 20th Century-Fox has rediscovered. The studio innocently and faithfully described Anne Bancroft and Shirley MacLaine as "aging ballerinas" in the upcoming The Turning Point. The actresses balked, and even the in-house memos were reworked. (The women are 45 and 43.)

•It figures that the occupants of the last White House arboreal refuge, Caroline and John-John Kennedy, would have used an effete Eastern ladder to clamber aboard. But Amy Carter scoffs at the old Camelot style. The only entry to her new tree house is to shinny up its supporting Atlas Cedar.